FRANKLIN TOWNSHIP — When the Hightstown and Montgomery High School boys’ ice hockey teams met tjos afternoon at Protec Pond, the coaches had different ideas about what they wanted to come from the game.

For Montgomery, which won the game 10-0, it was chance to get a win under its belt and get some time on the ice in a real game.

“We have never played Hightstown before, so it was good for them to come up and take a challenge,” head coach Robert Scarpa said. “They hung in for a while, but they had a short bench today, so it was tough. Their goalie kept them in the game for a long time.”

Montgomery (1-0) has set some modest goals for the season and getting off to a good start today helped.

“Honestly, we want to keep improving,” Scarpa said. “We are not sure what we are yet. We have had two pretty good scrimmages against good teams.

“We are a year older and a smarter. We have set a minor goal of getting to .500, so we can get into the state tournament.”

The Cougars got goals from six players, including a hat trick from Chris DeMarco and two goals each from Ryan Irving and Cam Garinger.

“We don’t have that superstar player like we used to have,” Scarpa said. “We don’t have three guys that will get 75 percent of our goals. We definitely have a good grind team.

They like to skate hard, and they battle hard. The goals are going to come from anyone who is in front of the net with their stick down, ready to get on the score sheet. You saw that today. We had about 15 shots from the line from defensemen.”

For the Rams, the game was a tune-up for the Colonial Valley Conference games they have in the future, starting with West Windsor-Plainsboro North Tuesday night.

“If you look at it, we didn’t have our full team today,” head coach Scott Litwack said. “Our D zone didn’t play bad. Our goalie (Calvin McKay) was phenomenal today.

“They had 55 shots, and he kept us in the game. We can take some good out of it and some stuff we need to work on. That was a tough team we played today. They would be top 3 in our league.”

Montgomery will take all the wins it can now, because Scarpa knows that when it gets into conference play, each game is a challenge.

“Our conference schedule has always gotten us ready for states,” he said. “You can tell when you get into the state tournament round of 32 or 16, those 45-minute tough games we play all year help us out so much.

“The Skyland Conference is just so tough with Ridge, Pingry, Hillsborough and Bridgewater-Raritan and all the other teams. It is definitely going to allow us to grow up a little more as we go along.”